The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2020 Edition

by Rich Horton

  • • •

  John C.’s typescript of the story came back to South Bend from the production company with a brief printed rejection notice, on which someone had written in ball-point pen This is good. Get an agent. John C. found it fairly easy to do that: an agent he found in a directory at the library, who had sold more than one story to the show as well as many stories to the drugstore mystery and science fiction magazines that John never read, responded quickly to his letter of inquiry and the (by now rather weary-looking) typed pages.

  With six hundred dollars the agent got him for publication and TV rights to the story—by then it was late summer and things were getting urgent—he could make a case for driving lessons, being now able to afford not only the extra insurance premium for a a couple of years to come but also the car itself. His father drove an Oldsmobile, having progressed upward over the years as many men did from one General Motors model to another—from Chevrolet to Pontiac to Olds, though it was unlikely that a doctor at a college student infirmary would ever arrive at a Buick or a Cadillac. For a first-time driver the choices were more limited, and John C.’s would come from the great pool of used Studebakers available at every price, any year and condition, there in the town where they were made. The family’s second car, driven by Mrs. C. and now also by John C.’s older sister—who was charged no additional insurance premium—was a 1949 Studebaker two-door coupe, one of the oddest cars ever produced by a major American manufacturer. “Can’t tell whether it’s coming or going,” a wag once remarked about its styling. The car for me, John C. said.

  First, though, he needed to learn to drive, and in that car he did.

  His father didn’t elect to do that work, so (having been taken to the bureau of motor vehicles and obtained a beginner’s license) he asked first his sister Martha, and when she begged off, his mother. She took him out to empty parking lots and back roads, and was amazed at his swift progress; it was almost (she said) as though it were in his blood. After a little practice, laughing at himself and the big car and its heavy pedals and huge steering wheel and column-mounted gearshift, he could get around easily; learned to parallel-park in minutes (after a period of smiling self-doubt); did three-point turns faultlessly. Maybe I should be a race-car driver, he said.

  Within a couple of weeks it was apparent he was ready to take a driver’s test, though he insisted he felt still uncertain, and needed more days. But he passed the driving test with ease—he told his mother (who sat in the back seat in a state between unease and hilarity) that it was because he’d worn a tie; an American young man in a tie qualifies for a license, he said, just by reason of those qualities. He’d never be a race-car driver, but not long after inheriting the Studebaker (his mother and sister moved a step up to a 1950 Chevy paid for in large part by John C.) he took it to a motor-parts shop that sold and installed racing equipment, and had a seat belt installed. It may have been the only Studie sedan in the city, perhaps the world, that had one.

  The remainder of the money he received from the sale of his story he divided between his father, for the insurance, and a brand new savings account. Then he settled down to meet St. Joe’s requirements and complete his junior year, driving himself to the Notre Dame library each day with a long yellow legal pad and a Scripto ball point pen made in two lovely shades of gray-green plastic, a red button like a mocking tongue projecting from the top to press: of all the things he recognized newly after his return this was among the most touching to him; he almost wept to see and use it. He sat at a long table in the library, a place he knew well, or he walked under the old trees of the campus, thinking about other things than the subjects of his papers or the facts about American government or organic chemistry he was committing to, or recalling from, memory. Nuns in the habits of many orders, attending summer school classes, strolled or hurried along the paths in twos and threes, books under their arms, veils lifted by the summer airs. In the cool basement of the Student Center he put dimes in the red machine for small pale-green bottles of Coca-Cola, again thinking of many things, and in the late afternoon drove home with dreamy slowness along the road past the old and humble Little Flower church where he’d been an altar boy not so long ago, past the road down which lived his beloved Miriam, schoolmate in eighth grade, turning on Ironwood past the new and unlovely Little Flower Church, and down the long hill to Ponader Drive. In his room after dinner he continued to write, volumes of the family Britannica next to him and papers on Macbeth and the Bicameral System growing longer while the laughter of TV audiences, mixed with his family’s, came in from the living room. A remarkable thing his family had noticed, resulting (presumably) from his accident and his coma, was that his handwriting had changed. It looked like the hand of someone else entirely: someone long out of school.

  • • •

  John C. enrolled at Central High School for the fall semester of 1959, having convinced his father and the principal and the director of studies that he had enough credits to transfer, and that with enough effort he could graduate in June of 1960. He was helped to select courses that would be applicable, and was allowed to take typing as an elective. When the semester began he found, without surprise, that he was the only male in the typing class. He loved it, loved the girls in their skirts and dresses, their beehive hairdos and flips, their Capezios and their tennis shoes. St Joseph’s had been divided into wings, one for the males taught by brothers, the other for females taught by nuns; the two connected nowhere. Now he sat amid the upright backs and lifted hands, the unearthly clatter of all the Remingtons going at once like an enfilade, and could hardly keep from laughing aloud in delight.

  That month his agent sold a new story of his to a science fiction magazine for twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents. On a Saturday he went to Robertson’s department store and bought new clothes: soft pleated grey flannel slacks, narrow at the ankle; white shirts, to be worn with the sleeves rolled up two turns; patterned sweaters in cashmere and merino. The cuffed slacks broke prettily over penny loafers (also new) and showed a bit of bright white sock. John C. had before been a poor dresser, mostly content with what his mother brought home from sales. In October he was ready to start dating, which the school he’d previously attended, and his lack of wheels, and his timidity, had made it difficult. His parents, who had never before seen any reason to give him a curfew, told him he must be in by ten on school nights, and by midnight on weekends. He never violated the rule.

  With a car and a daily drive to Central, and soon the trips to Barbara’s house in Sunnymede, a middle-class development off Wayne Street, or later on to Phyllis’s in the similarly named but very different Sunnyside Apartments on Jefferson Boulevard, he learned more about South Bend than he had in all his isolated years on Ponader Drive. He had always had an odd disability, a nearly absent sense of spatial orientation that for a long time he hadn’t actually perceived, just as people who have no color vision sometimes don’t perceive their lack until it’s proven to them. Now he knew about it, and knew he had to take it into account. He acquired a city map at a drugstore and marked it in colored pencils, the way to this place, the way to that, the houses of girls, the diners and carhop places, the drive-in movie theaters. At the drive-ins, the Western Theater on Peppermint Drive, the Moonlite on Chippewa, he sat with Phyllis resting in his arm and watched fox-eyed Natalie Wood and James Garner in Cash McCall, admiring Garner’s beautiful suits of blue and black. You’d look so sharp in that, Phyllis murmured, and John thought, yes, he would. When the second feature, The Electronic Monster, started he talked to Phyllis about Phyllis, looking with genuine delight and sympathy into her eyes, which strangely resembled Natalie Woods’s. Then no talking for a long time while the great beams of light from the projector played over the screen producing the illusion of motion. The cones of her white stitched bra were stiff; the sleek sateen of her underpants, which he found beneath the gingham skirt, grew damp beneath his hand: but he’d go no farther.

  Amazing how it was that he could no
w know, as though granted a new sense or instinct, what he hadn’t known, what other boys growing up elsewhere might have known but he never had: that the girls he was drawn to were just as drawn to him, some of them at least, and more than that: that their desires were as intense as his own, however muffled or tied down; and if you did know that, how easily released they were, right up to the last barriers. What trust they placed in him, what hope: that he’d be good, that he’d know them, know their hearts. And he was, and he did. And he’d bring them home and they’d straighten themselves in the odorous front seat and do their lipstick in the rear-view mirror, eyes soft in the street-light. In no way would he get in touble, the trouble that haunted parents, and no way he would get girls in trouble, wake up little Suzy. He broke no hearts; he made clear to them he would not, but neither would he would pledge his own. And he’d drift in at his front door at the appointed hour and his mother would look up from her mystery novel and look at him with interest and some kind of knowledge of her own that he had not suspected, not before; and in his narrow bed, night after night, he’d lie in the grip of a lust more potent and unceasing than he had ever felt—or rather than he had felt since he had last left this point in time behind and gone on into the life he was to lead. He’d relieve the pressure twice in a night and then sometimes wake from thrilling dreams anointed again, and turn his face to the wall in wonder, and he’d laugh: remembering, and at the same time being, what he once had been.

  • • •

  La Brea Medical Transcription Service • 1419 La Brea Avenue • Los Angeles CA 90019

  For: Dr. Carla Young PhD

  9/23/92 Initial Session

  CY Notes: John C. White male in good physical health, employed as a screenwriter, age 49. Presenting with undefined anxiety and midlife crisis.

  Transcript begins at 05:00:02

  CY: —and record our conversations, purely for my own uses. If you object . . .

  CY: No, no. It’s all right. I’m sure it will be useful. A record.

  CY: So how are you today? How can I help?

  CY: I’m fine, thank you, Doctor. I’m in trouble. I am at . . . an impasse, I guess would be the word.

  CY: Well all right. Good enough to start with, I suppose. Do you have any questions for me before we . . .

  CY: Several questions. Just deciding to make this appointment made me question myself.

  CY: Can you say what sort of questions?

  CY: Questions of how much I want to tell you, and whether what I tell you will be believed, and what good it would do me if you did believe me. Or didn’t.

  CY: Those are extremely important self-queries, but I think we’d need a lot more groundwork before it would be useful to address them. For us to address them together, or for you yourself to do so.

  CY: All right then.

  CY: Can we perhaps begin with the problem you named on the form?

  CY: The one I came in with, or maybe you’d say “presented” with?

  CY: Your creative block, or what you experience as one. We can begin with that, if that’s where you now feel comfortable.

  CY: I no longer feel comfortable at any time. But thank you, okay. The film. It’s an idea I’ve been working on for a long time. Years, actually. Now the situation seems right. Rocco Sisto has committed to the concept—you remember he got Best Actor last year for Midsummer, the Shakespeare adaptation. Terence Malick has expressed interest.

  CY: And?

  CY: And I—well—I can’t, I can’t conclude it.

  CY: You can’t imagine an ending for it.

  CY: No. I know how it has to end. It’s just that the story, as a film story, can’t end.

  CY: I’m lost. You’d better try to explain.

  CY: All right. This won’t be easy for me.

  CY: I’m patient.

  CY: Okay. The film story—or maybe better to call it the situation, because the story or what might be called the plot is the problem—is this. A man, a man about my age, learns that he can begin his life again, starting from a point in his past that he chooses, and can make it different: he can choose a different way of life, fulfill different ambitions, meet different people. And just as important avoid the choices he did make, the life he did lead, the people he did meet and get involved with.

  CY: Hm. And what earns him this chance?

  CY: Well, nothing. It just suddenly appears to him to be possible. That the world holds that possibility.

  CY: No magic ring, no djinni, no three wishes?

  CY: No. Anyway none will be revealed. But there’s one limit, or not a limit but a condition, or an out you might say, depending on how things work out for him. He is given a way to return to a point in his youth or childhood and then to mature and grow older again in a new life that he makes through new choices. But when that day comes around again, the date on which he first found he really could go back and do everything differently, he can—no, he must—decide whether to continue the new-made life, or return to the first life, and take it up again at exactly the place and moment he made the choice to leave it. And begin there at that moment again.

  CY: A sweet deal. He gets to make a whole new lifetime of mistakes and surprises and, I guess, gratifications, and then annul it. Is that what he does?

  CY: Well. That’s the problem. He’s approaching that day, and can’t decide. Or I can’t. The audience will have seen both lives, quite different in lots of ways but neither one clearly better or worse—crises or big moments from each life are shown in the year the character reaches them. Until, in fact, he reaches the age I am, or as he is, when this chance was given him. And he has to choose.

  CY: I see. I think I see.

  CY: It’s an aesthetic problem. If a character in a story is presented with two distinct things or paths or outcomes, and the story makes it possible that he might choose either—that is, in the story as it unfolds, neither possibility vanishes or becomes obviously wrong—then there is no right way to end the story.

  CY: Why is that?

  CY: Because audiences will perceive that either choice is arbitrary, is imposed by the creators, isn’t compelled. It could just as well have been the other. Neither choice can be a satisfactory ending.

  CY: Okay.

  CY: Like love stories, where a character has to make a choice between two people, neither of which is clearly Mr. Right. Or Ms. Right.

  CY: Okay.

  CY: Well. The commonest solution—and this is such a general problem in storytelling that it does have a common solution—is the Third Thing. The Third Thing is something, or someone, that has been in the story all along, little noticed or maybe misunderstood, but whose real nature is suddenly brought out at the end and negates the other two false choices.

  CY: As for instance . . .

  CY: For instance a woman’s first pulled to A, who’s nice, then to B who’s different but flawed, then back to A, who turns out to have a nasty secret. And all along she’s talking to her gay male friend about it all. And in the last minutes it’s revealed that the friend isn’t gay at all, that what she thought she knew about him was wrong, and he’s the right choice. The third thing. You get it, right?

  CY: Right. I pretty much got it when you began. So this third-thing solution—is finding that third thing what you are stuck on?

  CY: I’m stuck because there is no third thing. There can be no third thing in this story. And whichever choice the character makes is at once neither the right nor the wrong one, and likewise the choice that he doesn’t make. And not to make a choice, to remain in the state he’s in, well, that’s to make a choice as well, and is unsatisfactory in the same way.

  CY: It’s Buridan’s ass.

  CY: It’s what?

  CY: Buridan’s ass. An ancient philosophical problem posed in, I don’t know, the 12th century maybe? A problem of choice. An ass—you know, a donkey—is standing equidistant from two piles of hay. Each pile is the same size, the same tastiness or whatever it is that makes some hay more appealing than ot
her hay, all of that exactly equal. And so the donkey can’t make a choice. Has no rational basis on which to make a choice. And so . . .

  CY: He starves to death.

  CY: Right. Actually there’s a different and in a way more interesting version, where the donkey is equidistant between two different things, a pile of hay and a bucket of water, and he’s exactly as hungry as he is thirsty, and so . . .

  CY: So he . . . he . . . Yes.

  CY: Is that what your story is? A philosophical problem play? A problem you want to work out by creating a character who faces it?

  CY: No, no.

  CY: It would seem to be at least metaphorical, wouldn’t you say? Is that the difficulty? To get the story to reflect what you want to say about your own life. You seek to grasp what it is in your life that seems insufficient or disappointing . . .

  CY: It’s not metaphorical. It’s . . . autobiographical in nature.

  CY: Autobiographical.

  CY: Yes.

  CY: You mean that the events that happen to the character in the first life you describe resemble the facts of your own life? Or do you mean that the events and people in the other, the imagined life, are autobiographical—

  CY: No. Not either of those.

  CY: Maybe “metaphorical” wasn’t the right word. But it’s sort of well known that people who come to therapists with some very particular reason or problem they want to work on—their suffering actually comes from some other source. Even if the initial reason is real enough to them. But in order for me to help . . .

  CY: Doctor. What I need from you is not any of that . . . argumentation.

  CY: Then what?

  CY: I’ve come for is to ask for help in making this decision. You have to listen. You have to listen first to all that happened and then you have to help me to decide.